Laurent Dauptain was born in Paris on March 25th in 1961. From the age of six he attended painting classes for adults. At the age of 18, he wins first prize at the entrance exam of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He later goes on to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and the Sorbonne University in Paris.

His first solo exhibition in 1981 has the title “Self- portraits” – a theme that will stay his characteristic subject to this day. He has painted and drawn more than 2000 self-portraits in a variety of styles. Laurent Dauptain has also gained recognition for his urban and industrial landscapes, marine paintings, and still lifes.

The work of Laurent Dauptain seduces, fruit of a liberated view, subtle, that works into the powers of the emotional and intimate universal dimension. Heir of the great classical French tradition, he is still undeniably in the present by this compositional quality of his stroke. Caressing and nourishing, his stroke transforms the subject into a moment of painting, a snapshot forever uncertain. There is this constant willingness to strip the model from the anecdotal and to keep only the substance, a search that is as significant in his landscapes, be it from Europe or the United States, as it is in his self-portraits, a constant in his oeuvre. Since his beginning, Dauptain has undertaken a work on his own face. This face, in turn Christian or expressionist, exposes the force of his vision. With this delicate exercise, at the knife’s edge, ignoring narcissism and self-celebration, he tells his own story, but also speaks of the passing of time, and discusses in passing masterfully pictorial problems related to the question of representation … and paradoxically, transforms this obsessional face-to-face into a lesson of humanity.” (PHILIPPE ANCELIN, La Gazette, Drouot Nr 3, January 2013)